Saturday, June 30, 2007

Most of us understand that the imprisonment, torture and now trial of the hapless Jose Padilla is a sham, based on nothing more than, as WSWS author Alex Lantier, writes, the USG's attempts at terror fear mongering. Yet, it's sometimes good to take a look at the shocking, scandalous details to get a renewed sense of the nightmare world we're now deep into as a result of two stolen elections by the most vicious elements of our society who have us in their merciless grip.The high profile arrest and torture of an obviously innocent person might serve as indirect evidence of who the real terrorists were on 9/11 but much of the Left still refuses to look closely at the evidence much less connect the dots. Is it because despite all the evidence that 99% of all effective terror such as 9/11, WTC '93, London, Madrid, Oklahoma City and much more is planned and executed by the State, most of the Left like the Right is more comfortable with the notion of Muslim terror?Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.org

Padilla “terrorism support trial” unravelsBy Alex Lantier30 June 2007The US government’s “terrorism support trial” against Jose Padilla and two acquaintances, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, is rapidly unraveling as the prosecution continued with its case this week. Even though US District Judge Marcia Cooke has let the prosecution introduce irrelevant evidence and proceed despite procedural violations, it is clear the prosecution is grasping at straws to make a case against the accused.

Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in May 2002, imprisoned and held without charges or access to a lawyer, in breach of fundamental democratic rights. The Bush administration declared that Padilla was an imminent terrorist threat to the US, planning to explode radioactive “dirty bombs” in US cities. Padilla has stated that he was tortured for three and a half years in a US military brig—held in total solitary confinement, often in painful stress positions, deprived of sleep, and force-fed psychoactive drugs such as LSD and PCP meant to act as “truth serums.”

The trial of Padilla, whom the prosecution had verbally downgraded from a “terrorist” to a “terrorism support” suspect while dropping any talk of a “dirty bomb” plot, began in May 2007. The proceedings have many times over justified an earlier assessment of Cooke, who euphemistically described the prosecution’s case as “light on facts.”

The prosecution is attempting to establish that Jose Padilla’s friends, Hassoun and Jayyousi, tried to recruit Padilla for terrorist actions in the Middle East. In doing so, it is relying on a massive archive of wiretaps of the three men’s phone conversations.

In the mid-1990s Hassoun and Jayyousi apparently helped Padilla, a recent convert to Islam, travel to Egypt to try to study to become an imam at the prestigious al-Azhar University in Cairo. They also sent money abroad to various parts of the Muslim world as charitable donations that prosecutors alleged were destined for terrorist groups.

The prosecution has sought to explain the absence of any discussion of terrorism in the recorded conversations by claiming that the three were speaking in code. Thus “soccer equipment” supposedly meant guns, “eating cheese” meant violent jihad, and so forth.

This aspect of the prosecution’s case against Padilla collapsed when lead FBI agent James T. Kavanaugh admitted, under cross-examination by defense lawyers, that Padilla did not in fact use any of these alleged “code words” in his phone conversations. However, by this point jurors had already listened to many days of private conversations between Padilla, Hassoun, and Jayyousi. In these conversations, Padilla mainly described the difficulties of adjusting to his life in Egypt, his struggle to master Arabic, and the widespread suspicions amongst Islamic circles that he might be a US spy sent to monitor them.

The only significant piece of physical evidence for the prosecution is a “mujahideen identification form,” allegedly discovered by US forces in Afghanistan, that bears an alleged alias of Padilla and on which the government says his fingerprints have been found.

On Friday, Rohan Gunaratna, described as a “terrorist expert” by the prosecution and the media, testified that the document was similar to others he has examined relating to Al Qaeda. Gunaratna insisted that the camp Padilla is said to have attended was where “they trained people to kill.”

Gunaratna has made a name and career for himself by testifying and giving media appearances in support of cases against alleged terrorist suspects. His credibility as an “expert” on these matters is extremely strained, however. For example, he quickly shifted his position on David Hicks, the Australian prisoner who was held for years in Guantánamo Bay, after the US announced it would try him by military commission. (See “The Australian media and terrorism ‘expert’ Dr Rohan Gunaratna”)

In fact, there is no independent evidence that Padilla ever traveled to Afghanistan. Padilla’s lawyers have argued that Padilla’s fingerprints on the form probably came from when he was handed the form while in US custody.

Given the unsubstantiated allegations against Padilla that US officials have already made and dropped, there is no reason to suppose that this “evidence” is any more genuine. The defense is due to cross-examine Gunaratna next week.

In an attempt to use widespread US hatred of Osama bin Laden to impugn the defendants, the prosecution has repeatedly referred to bin Laden and Al Qaeda in its arguments. As proof of Hasson’s and Jayyousi’s terrorist inclinations, it cited the fact that FBI phone taps of Hassoun and Jayyousi picked up a discussion of a 1997 CNN interview between Osama bin Laden and reporter Peter Arnett. In the interview, bin Laden described the US as “unjust” and “tyrannical” and praised “heroes” who attacked US military forces.

Prosecutors insisted on showing a video of the interview at the trial. Defense lawyers quickly pointed out that there was no evidence Padilla had ever seen the bin Laden interview, and that it was not relevant to the case against Padilla as bin Laden discussed attacks on US forces, for which Padilla was not recruited, even according to the prosecution’s allegations. Despite the inflammatory and irrelevant character of the evidence, the judge ruled that the prosecution could proceed with showing the video.

The bin Laden interview also fails to provide any meaningful evidence against Hassoun and Jayyousi. In their phone conversations, they agreed with the description of US foreign policy as “unjust” and described bin Laden’s performance in the interview as “powerful,” but were also heard to describe bin Laden as “scary.” The entire bin Laden interview issue therefore appears to have been a red herring—a way for the prosecution to associate bin Laden with the defendants in jurors’ minds.

In a further trial mishap, defense lawyers argued earlier this week for a mistrial after some jurors witnessed one of the defendants in chains, a violation of trial procedure since it could prejudice the jury. The judge ruled against the defense and allowed the trial to continue.

The trial of Padilla is part of a long process of abuse, shifting rationales, and sensational charges. When Padilla was arrested, the media trumpeted his alleged actions in order to bolster government fear-mongering over a supposedly imminent terrorist threat. His trial, by contrast, has been virtually ignored, now that these charges have been deflated.

When, in November 2005, after years of secret detention, a Supreme Court intervention threatened to bring up the Bush administration’s practice of extra-legal detention, Padilla was hastily transferred to a Florida criminal court. US officials started cobbling together accusations against him of conspiracy and aid to terrorists abroad. The fact that the “dirty bomb” allegations were dropped was a clear sign that they were fabricated to begin with.

Padilla’s attorneys’ repeated efforts to get the case dismissed on the basis of grievous procedural errors were turned down. In October 2006, they argued that the US government had forfeited its right to try Padilla by torturing him, based on the US legal tradition that if treatment of the accused “shocks the conscience” the case against him must be thrown out.

In February 2007, his attorneys presented detailed testimony that Padilla suffered from serious mental impairment as a result of years of torture and was unable to participate in his own defense. In both cases, the judge allowed the case to proceed.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Glenn Greenwald is a great treasure and you just have to thank him once again, this time for taking the time and trouble to nail the Podhoretzs -- father and son -- for who they are and what they are. At the end he suggests that their desire to kill millions of Iranians (on Israel's behalf, and on behalf of their own sickness) reflects the mainstream. But I doubt it. The mainstream pretty much understands how crazy and cruel and psychopathic such a project would be. The great problem is that the Podhoretzs speak for the decision makers, Bush and Cheney who, if we read the latest tea leaves correctly, seem intent on bombing Iran sometime next year.Interestingly, while Greenwald has no problem labeling Podhoretz psychopathic, he doesn't do the same for Bush and Cheney who have done nothing but reveal their pathology for the last 6 years.--Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.orgGlenn GreenwaldThursday June 21, 2007http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.htmlFace of a psychopath

Neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz followed up his Commentary article titled "The case for bombing Iran" -- excerpts of which were re-published in The Wall St. Journal -- with an interview elaborating on why he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran and how he envisions the bombings. Though he generously acknowledges that such an action would likely "unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a lovefest" -- consequences to which he is transparently (and revealingly) indifferent -- he goes on to suggest that Europeans and even the Muslim world might be grateful for our attack; the bombs will be greeted as Bombs of Liberation and Protection:

It's entirely possible that many countries, particularly in the Middle East -- the Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, who are very worried about Iranian influence and power --would at least secretly applaud us. And I think it's possible that other countries in Europe, for example, and elsewhere, would be relieved to see the Iranians entirely deprived of the capability to build nuclear weapons, or at least have that ability retarded for five or 10 years or more.

As Think Progress notes, not only would a bombing campaign fail to stop the Iranian nuclear program, it would be far more likely to accelerate it, just as the Israeli attack on the Iraqi program did. And a military bombing campaign, guaranteed to kill untold numbers of Iranian civilians, would obviously unite Iranians in anti-American hatred and generate unified support for the most militant political elements in that country.

But beyond those rather obvious points, just contemplate the level of bombing and slaughter that would be required merely to have a chance of fulfilling Podhoretz's goal of "entirely depriv[ing Iran] of the capability to build nuclear weapons, or at least have that ability retarded for five or 10 years or more." How would that be remotely possible without bombing them until Podhoretz's real goal -- regime change -- were achieved, a goal which, if achievable at all, would require bombing so widespread and brutal that it ought to be unthinkable. Yet Podhoretz sits there, in the most smug and casual manner, and blithely "hopes and prays" that we do it.

Any doubts about what Norman Podhoretz is -- and what the movement is which reveres him -- ought to be forever dispelled by his answer, given in the same interview, to the question of what the British should have done in response to the detention of 15 of their sailors by Iran:

They should have threatened to bomb the Iranians into smithereens if the sailors weren't returned immediately. They should have threatened it. Whether they would have had to carry out the threat, I doubt, maybe they would have.

Just think about that. England should have threatened and then "bombed the Iranians into smithereens" if their sailors were not returned immediately. Contemplate the depravity required even to suggest such a thing -- that a nation of more than 70 million human beings be reduced to rubble, perhaps vaporzied, over an incident of that magnitude, which was peacefully resolved after two weeks. It is really warped beyond belief. And it's the tone that is almost as notable as the content -- the breezy, smug wave of the hand that signifies the brutal deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, possibly many more.

And there is nothing unusual about Norm Podhoretz in the neoconservative world that he leads. Unsurprisingly, it is Norm's son, John, who -- beyond his garden-variety excitement over bombing Iran -- made one of the most reprehensible and deranged (though illustrative) statements of the entire Bush presidency:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

At the time, Greg Djerejian said in response:

It's quite sad that the son of an accomplished, prestigious American intellectual would muse so innocuously about the merits of mass butchery--basically the wholesale slaughter of a broad demographic of an ethnic group writ large--a policy prescription that is quasi-genocidal in nature.

It may be "sad," but at this point it is certainly unsurprising. And the "accomplished, prestigious American intellectual" who is John Podhoretz's father shares the family enthusiasm for "mass butchery." And while all of our media stars solemnly lament how the "fringe" liberal bloggers are ruining our political culture with all of their naughty words and extremism, the genocide-craving Podhoretz Family sits at the epicenter of a political movement that is still as predominant and powerful as it is deranged, and they are treated with the utmost seriousness and respect.

In this week's Newsweek, Michael Hirsh has a worthwhile article reporting on his observations during his visit to Iran. While listing the internally repressive measures taken by the Iranian governemnt, Hirsh describes Tehran as "bustling," as "traffic crowds the streets and boulevards," filled with the "chic" Iranian women and the "meterosexual" Iranian males who seek greater economic security and prosperity. That is what Norm Podhoretz and his friends hungrily want to annihilate.

Matt Yglesias, in a recent post about the administration's "debate" over whether to bomb Iran, wisely included a random photograph of an Iranian street with civilians walking on it. These are the people Norm Podhoretz and his comrades want to slaughter:

[Photo by Flickr user Koldo used under a Creative Commons license]

Our ability to render invisible the people we kill when cheering on our wars is one of the primary mechanisms which make it so easy to embrace that option. Yesterday, a quite revealing exchange occurred during the White House Press gaggle; it is unnecessary to identify the reporter asking these questions because there is really only one White House correspondent who would (the one who is considered to be "crazy" by her "journalistic" colleagues as a result of disrespectful and annoyingly off-script outbursts like this):

Q A study shows that Iraq is the second-most unstable country in the world. Do we have anything to do with that?

MR. SNOW: Do we have anything to do with that? Yes, I saw the study --

Q -- the killing?

MR. SNOW: We don't -- I'm not sure I got the --

Q I'm talking about Petraeus, also, intensifying -- is he trying to build a kill record before September?

MR. SNOW: No. No. In point of fact, Helen, if you take a look at the record of the last two months, the people who have been trying to put together the kill record are al Qaeda. Go to the mosques --

Q Is everybody who resists our occupation a terrorist?

MR. SNOW: Do you think somebody who goes in and blows up 50 people in a mosque is resisting occupation?

Q What have we done for five years?

MR. SNOW: What we have been trying to do is to work with folks to deal with a highly volatile situation in Iraq in the wake of a murderous regime --

Q We've killed thousands of people, tens of thousands --

MR. SNOW: Many have died, and hundreds of thousands died under the previous regime. This is a place that has too long been wracked by violence. And the fact that in fighting --

Q We're not supposed to be comparing, are we?

MR. SNOW: Unfortunately, if we fought evil guys who simply would say, you caught us, we're evil, we give up, we'll be good -- that would be great, that would be wonderful.

Q Everybody isn't evil who fights for his land.

MR. SNOW: A lot of the people we're talking about, Helen, aren't fighting for their land, because it's not their land. They don't even come from Iraq.

Q Are we fighting Iraqis, inherently, in their own country?

MR. SNOW: Are we fighting Iraqis inherently? I think if you take a look at what General Petraeus is saying, is that increasingly Iraqis are joining with us to defend their country from the onslaught of outside fighters, whether they be from al Qaeda or Iran.

Q Good, but we have to admit we're killing a lot of Iraqis who are against our presence.

MR. SNOW: I'm not sure. I mean, that requires the kind of canvas of those who have died that I'm not capable of doing.

Nothing could be more boring to Tony Snow than the question of how many Iraqi civilians we have killed as a result of our invasion and occupation. His yawn is virtually audible. What could be less relevant than that? It is better if we do not know. We can just keep repeating over and over that we are "killing Al Qaeda" -- a "fact" which Michael Gordon and The New York Times will be happy repeatedly to re-inforce -- and we can ignore the rest.

What Norman Podhoretz is advocating -- blowing Iran into "smithereens" -- is criminal and morally twisted for reasons that should require no elaboration. But the far more significant fact is that such advocacy does not relegate him to the fringes. Quite the contrary, the movement of which he is an integral part, on whose behalf he speaks, is well within the political mainstream as depicted by our political press. And it is doubtful that there is anything he (and his comrades) could do or say which would change that.

-- Glenn Greenwald***Ellen wrote:Yes, it's a good piece about the genocidal duo. He doesn't go far enough for me. The neocons are the new nazis. It's not good form to say this, but this is what the US is: the Fourth Reich. I agree with Ronald that Greenwald should have said something about the arch-fiends Cheney and Bush.

Jennifer Loewenstein brilliantly and econmically explains that the Hamas "victory" is not a defeat but a victory for the Bush doctrine and for Israel. Not exactly news to many readers, but cogently and importantly argued.

Lowenstein might have added Iraq as a similar triumph, and as she notes, the "terror" states have the same in mind for Syria and Lebanon. As she writes, Israel is "'a terrorist state that seeks the destruction of Palestine.' Seeks and is succeeding in it."

Now all we need to do is find a way to make that truth as clear to the West as it is to the victims of Israeli/US policy.

See below for a couple of my quibbles.Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.org***June 25, 2007Brothers-in-ArmsThe Triumph of US/Israeli Policy in Palestinehttp://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein06252007.htmlBy JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Contrary to the many claims that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip represents the failure of US and Israeli policies in Palestine, the violent civil infighting that has dominated the Gaza Strip over much of the last year and a half and that led directly to the Hamas coup of June 2007, marks yet another major foreign policy victory for the occupiers. Hamas will never be allowed to remain in power in Gaza so we must fear for the future of that tiny, desperately overcrowded strip of land and its 1.4 million inhabitants; additionally, Abbas ­in order to maintain his role as "Good Guy"- will have to accede to the dictates of Israel and the United States or suffer the same fate as his predecessor, Yassir Arafat.

Western nations are standing by in silence as the deadly siege of Gaza and the dismemberment of the West Bank continue unabated. What we are witnessing in full view each day are unprecedented steps taken by the world's only superpower and its favorite client state, Israel, to ensure the death of a nation. While friction between the two key political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories has long undermined the smooth functioning of internal affairs, it was the direct, cynical involvement of US and Israeli policy-makers in these affairs that guaranteed the breakdown of internal stability and paved the way for the Hamas "coup" in Gaza.

Media reports have been careful to leave out important facts leading up to the coup such as that Hamas was the legitimate, democratically elected ruling party in the Palestinian territories following the January 2006 Palestine Legislative Council elections; that it was the US-Israeli dismissal of those election results that fueled the civil infighting between Hamas and Fatah; that obvious US backing of Fatah against Hamas helped create popular mistrust of Fatah increasing Hamas' popularity in Gaza and leading directly to Hamas' takeover of the Fatah military apparatus in the Gaza Strip. In other words, there were real and understandable reasons for the coup. But in the end, Hamas' seizure of the power it should have had in the first place ends up serving the interests not only of Mahmoud Abbas and the warlord Muhammad Dahlan. It also provides the perfect opportunity for US-Israeli policy in the region to move forward with even fewer objections, if that is possible to imagine, than have heretofore been made. Who will stand up for a "terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of Israel"? The line has been beaten into our heads with every mention of the word "Hamas" for years. We should not expect a change in the behavior of the American public or of other western audiences until, when Israel is mentioned, we immediately say to ourselves, "a terrorist state that seeks the destruction of Palestine." Seeks and is succeeding in it.

II.

Watching the barbarous killing between brothers in Gaza, a power struggle between rival factions seething in frenzy like the great prison in which they thrive, Israeli and American political analysts can rest their cases with confidence. Across the spectrum of debate, these experts can expect vindication by the media juries who, in sanctimonious indignation at the brutality meted out by partisans of Fatah or Hamas, have assembled all the "evidence" they need to justify our righteous war against Muslim-Arab terrorists and their internecine blood feuds.

That the US has temporarily chosen a weak, compliant leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and the power thirsty warlord, Muhammad Dahlan, to back during the bitter strife between key Palestinian factions testifies not to a belief that one side is trustworthy and deserves our support, but rather to the ease with which the Americans and their clients pick and choose their pawns in their bitter regional cockfights. Today's statesmen were yesterday terrorists, their titles dependent on the needs of the superpower and its clients: yesterday Fatah was on the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and its leader, Yassir Arafat, was a declared "terrorist," "irrelevant," and exiled in his presidential compound in Ramallah until his mysterious death. Fatah's military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades is still listed as a foreign terrorist organization. Neither of these factors apparently bothers the current leadership which understands that power and prestige are most easily acquired and unchallenged when bequeathed from above.

Truth be told, the Abbas/Dahlan alliance elicits far greater contempt in the eyes of the masters than the more independent and genuine resistance faction headed by Hamas. The numerous meetings and photo-ops between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, and US President George Bush and Abbas, are little more than tactical stunts to make it look as though genuine negotiations are taking place. In fact, Abbas has been repeatedly by-passed and shunned when Israeli and US negotiators make the real policy decisions; decisions that remain one-sided and dismissive of any demands-other than those that are entirely self-serving-that Abbas and his entourage have made. The arms and funding channeled through Abbas' Fatah (for his clique represents only one of the many spin-off Fatahs that emerged during the second Intifada) signify little more than the conduit through which US-Israeli policies can be secured. For all the claims about US backing of Fatah, neither Abbas nor Dahlan have yet to benefit on the ground from this "support". Indeed, the ease with which Hamas was able to wrest control of Gaza indicates just how little US support for Fatah was worth there. Nevertheless, the same pipeline of support for "Fatah" has done a great deal to bolster perceived US and Israeli national security interests in the same region.

III.

Once again the pictures on our television screens in our newspapers are intended to suffice for missing substance; the context of empire is invisible or deliberately obscured ­in Palestine as in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. If the takeover of Gaza by Hamas was unanticipated, its success was a gift of immeasurable value to the overlords; a welcome but unforeseen consequence of fueling divisions among a weakened and oppressed people, undermining any steps toward positive change. Abbas and his underlings have foolishly offered up Palestine cut in two to the occupation regime that worked so hard to end the charade of a single Palestine to begin with.

[A quibble here: Lowenstein's word --foolishly -- implies that there was some choice in the matter. As she points out Palestinians were chosen for their compliance. Similarly Israel's policy has been to remove any Palestinian who it could not bend to its control which explains Arafat's long tenure and their assassination and torture policies.]

This was a coup for Israel in its on-going quest for regional hegemony, and a triumph for America's "War on Terror." For all the talk about a one-, two- or bi-national state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the reality is that no state solution for Palestine is on the near or distant horizon. Palestine is a series of disconnected pieces whose division into still smaller parts continues month after month.

Those fretting about a "Hamastan" in the Gaza Strip ought to be worried not about its viability or longevity or about whether or not Islamic law and social mores will be imposed. Hamas' presence in Gaza will be but a short-lived, transitory phenomenon entirely at the mercy of the US-backed Israeli military which has not left Gaza alone for a single day since Hamas' coming to power despite a yearlong ceasefire called by its leaders and scrupulously observed. Those concerned about a Hamas-controlled Gaza ought instead to be wondering how they are going to justify Hamas' destruction within the Strip and all the suffering, chaos and death that will ensue over the shameful silence of the international community.

[Here I'm not sure what Lowenstein means by the destruction of Hamas aside from the expulsion of the 1.4 million Gazans -- and where exactly are they supposed to go? The only thing we know is where Israel and Elliott Abrams want them to go.]

IV.

Claims that Hamas' "victory" in the Gaza Strip is a sign that the Bush Doctrine in Palestine has failed are misguided. While no one can foresee all of the events that might take place in a region as volatile as the Middle East, Hamas' takeover in Gaza will ultimately benefit Israel and the United States. It will benefit Israel by giving it a free hand to destroy Hamas, permanently sever the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, and re-"negotiate" with its newly appointed "partners" the remaining islands of economically unviable territory that will soon be entirely encircled by a concrete and barbed-wire wall, cut off from their supplies of water and fertile land, and separated internally by "Arab-free" roads. It will benefit Israel and the United States by assuring another compliant puppet regime adjacent to Jordan, friendly to Egypt and Saudi Arabia and hostile to Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, even as the fault lines harden. It has already benefited both Israel and the United States by reassuring them that their tactics for undermining indigenous experiments in democracy have once again proven effective; that the people who have dared to defy those tactics learn quickly how painful it is to advocate or practice popular sovereignty and the rule of law.

Mahmoud Abbas has already learned how well complicity and collaboration are rewarded. Having dismissed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, dissolved the national unity government, declared a new, 'legitimate' government under his rule and appointed his friends to work beside him, he recently stepped into the limelight with an address on Palestine TV, broadcast in the US on C-SPAN, by announcing how he would further "enhance democracy." This would begin by no longer speaking to "murderers," by which he meant Hamas.

Clearly, his membership application into the club of the Good Guys has been, for the time being, approved.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the board of the Israeli Coalition against House Demolitions-USA branch, founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and a freelance journalist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

Saturday, June 23, 2007

06/20/07 "ICH" -- - When Hamas gunmen stormed the Fatah security compounds in Gaza last week they found huge supplies of American-made weaponry including 7,400 M-16 assault rifles, dozens of mounted machine guns, rocket launchers, 7 armored military jeeps, 800,000 rounds of bullets and 18 US-made armored personnel carriers. They also discovered something far more valuable--- CIA files which purportedly contain "information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza." (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily.com)

If the documents prove to be authentic, they will confirm what many critics of Fatah believed from the beginning; that US-Israeli intelligence agencies have been collaborating with high-ranking members of the PA to help crush the Palestinian national liberation movement. The information could be disastrous for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his newly-appointed “emergency government”. It could destroy their credibility before they even take office.

The extent of Fatah’s cooperation with the CIA is still unknown, but an article in The New York Sun, (“Hamas Takes over Gaza Security Services” 6-15-07) suggests that the two groups may have been working together closely. Former Middle East CIA operations officer Robert Baer, who was interviewed in the article, said that the discovery of the documents was “a major blow to Fatah” and will show “a record of training, spying on Hamas”.

Baer added ironically, “Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point.”

Baer is right. The uncovering of the documents is “big trouble” for Abbas who is already facing a loss of public confidence from his closeness to Israel and for his appointment of Salam Fayyad, the ex-World bank official who the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz calls “everyone’s favorite Palestinian.”

Perhaps more significant is the fact that members of Hamas who spoke with WorldNetDaily claimed that “the files contain, among other information, details of CIA networks in the Middle East” and that Hamas plans to “use these documents and make portions public to prove the collaboration between America and traitor Arab countries.” Imagine what a headache it will be for the Bush administration if Hamas exposes the broader network of US spies and Arab quislings operating throughout region.

Bush Support for “Regime Change” in the PA

It’s no secret that the Bush administration has been funneling money to Palestinian militias that are preparing to overthrow Hamas. On Monday, Condoleezza Rice announced that the US would resume “full assistance to the Palestinian government” and end the year long boycott to the people in the West Bank. The new aid—which could amount to as much as $86 million---will be used to shore up the PA security apparatus and pay the salaries of officials in the “emergency government.” The uncovering of the CIA documents in Gaza will cast a cloud over the administration’s largesse and make Abbas look like a Palestinian Karzai who gets financial treats from Washington to follow their diktats.

Yesterday, Condoleezza Rice was given the task of outlining the administration’s new policy vis-à-vis the Abbas’ “emergency government”. The Bush team had already decided the night before that they would throw their full support behind Abbas and his “unelected” clatter of pro-western stooges. Rice could hardly contain her glee the next day when she ascended the podium and began wagging her finger reproachfully at Hamas:

"Hamas has made its choice,” Condi growled. “It has sought to attempt to extinguish democratic debate with violence and to impose its extremist’s agenda on the Palestinian people in Gaza, now responsible Palestinians are making their choice and it is the duty of the international community to support those Palestinians who wish to build a better life and a future of peace."

This typically Orwellian statement was intended to justify the deposing of the legally-elected government of Palestine. No matter; Rice’s pronouncements are always reiterated verbatim in the media without challenge regardless of how incongruous they may be.

The Bush administration had plenty of time to observe developments on the ground and make an informed decision about what to do next. There was no need to hurry. Instead, they decided to blunder ahead and launch their “West Bank First” policy which commits US support to Abbas without any consideration of the public mood. The frantic pace of the decision-making, makes it look like Bush and Olmert are elevating Abbas to promote their own political agendas. Naturally, the Palestinians can be expected to resent this conspicuous outside meddling.

Former President Jimmy Carter was the first to blast Bush’s new plan. He said that “the United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements…. Carter said that Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government and that the Bush administration's refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was ‘criminal.’”

Carter’s comments appeared in just one newspaper--the Jerusalem Post. The ex-president has been increasingly marginalized since he dared to imply that Israel is an apartheid state. But Carter's analysis is dead-on---Bush is just aggravating an already tense situation. He’d be better off trying to bring the two sides together and reconciling their differences rather than igniting a potentially explosive confrontation. Besides, Abbas’ close ties to Washington and Tel Aviv doesn’t bode well for his government’s long-term prospects. The US and Israel are widely reviled in the occupied territories and, as author Khalid Amayreh says, “Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy Government.

Three days ago Abbas disbanded the Hamas-dominated parliament and sacked Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Abbas had no legal justification for this action. In fact, the "Basic Law" which applies to this case stipulates that “The President cannot suspend the legislative Council during a state of emergency” and there is “no provision whatsoever for an emergency government”. The president does not even have the authority to “call for new elections”---let alone, replace the elected representatives of the people. Abbas only support comes from political leaders in Tel Aviv and Washington and their reluctant accomplices in the EU.

The key issue here is whether democratic elections have any real meaning or if they can simply be rescinded by executive decree?

This question should be as relevant to Americans as it is to Palestinians. After all, both people now face a similar predicament; the flagrant abuse of executive authority to enhance the powers of the president. In both cases, the president must be forced to conform to the law. Democracy cannot be decided by fiat.

Free elections are not a crime---that is, unless one lives in the Occupied Territories. Then voting for the candidate of one’s choice provides the justification for cutting off food, water, medicine, and financial resources—as well a stepping up a campaign of illegal detentions, destruction of personal property and targeted assassinations.

This is what the “Bush Doctrine” looks like in the Gaza Strip today. The occupants of the “most densely populated place on earth” participated in the balloting at insistence of the Bush administration and they’ve been rewarded for their cooperation with a savage boycott and daily brutality.

If Bush didn’t want democracy, then why did he force it on the Palestinians?

Political powerbrokers in the US and Israel immediately rejected the election results and initiated a plan to scuttle Hamas through economic strangulation, persistent harassment and covert warfare. For the last year, the newly “elected” government has shown remarkable restraint under constant assault. Hamas has kept its word and refrained from suicide bombings in Israel even though hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been killed or injured during that same time. In fact, there has NOT BEEN ONE HAMAS-BACKED SUICIDE BOMBING SINCE THE PARTY TOOK OFFICE. (This fact is invariably ignored by the media which is far-more sympathetic to the Israeli position) We should remember that suicide bombing has been used for years as the excuse for putting off “final settlement” negotiations. Now that the bombing has stopped, Israel has invented an entirely new excuse to avoid dialogue, that is, that Hamas “refuses to recognize the state of Israel”.

Actually, it is Israel that refuses to accept Palestinian statehood---a fact that is further underlined by its relentless efforts to topple the Hamas government.

Hamas has done nothing illegal since they were elected. The Qassam rockets which are fired into Israel are the unavoidable corollary of the 40-year long occupation. How is Hamas supposed to stop these sporadic attacks? If Israel seriously believed that Hamas was responsible for the rockets, they wouldn’t hesitate to arrest or kill every leader in the current parliament. The fact is, Israel knows that Hamas is not instigating these attacks. It’s just another red herring.

Regardless of what one may think about Hamas, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has shown that he is a man who can be trusted to keep his word. In an interview in the Washington Post with Lally Weymouth, Haniyeh and asked him if Hamas sought the “obliteration of the Jewish people”? (another myth propagated in the western press)

Haniyeh answered, “We do not have any feelings of animosity toward Jews. We do not wish to throw them into the sea. All we seek is to be given our land back, not to harm anybody.”

This, of course, is not the response that neocon extremists in the US-Israeli political establishment want to hear. It undermines the rationale for the ongoing military occupation and expansion of illegal settlements. They would rather promote the image of Palestinians as vicious radicals bent on the Israel’s complete annihilation. But how accurate is that image?

In a particularly affecting editorial in the Washington Post, Prime Minister Haniyeh stated his case in simple terms. He said:

“As I inspect the ruins of our infrastructure---all turned to rubble once more by F-16s and American-made missiles -- my thoughts again turn to the minds of Americans. What do they think of this?

They think of the pluck and "toughness" of Israel, "standing up" to "terrorists." Yet a nuclear Israel possesses the 13th-largest military force on the planet, one that is used to rule an area about the size of New Jersey and whose adversaries there have no conventional armed forces. Who is the underdog, supposedly America's traditional favorite, in this case?

I hope that Americans will give careful thought to root causes and historical realities, (of) why a supposedly "legitimate" state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals.

Israel's nearly complete control over the lives of Palestinians is never in doubt, as confirmed by the humanitarian and economic suffering of the Palestinians since the January elections. Israel's ongoing policies of expansion, military control and assassination mock any notion of sovereignty or bilateralism. Its "separation barrier," running across our land, is hardly a good-faith gesture toward future coexistence.

But there is a remedy, and while it is not easy it is consistent with our long-held beliefs. Palestinian priorities include recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion. Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media, the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank; it is a wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner.

This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law. Meaningful negotiations with a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel can proceed only after this tremendous labor has begun”.

Haniyeh’s appeal to the American people helps us understand that what Hamas really wants is for Israel to conform to “unanimously approved” UN resolutions “predicated on historical truth, equity and justice.”

Does that sound unreasonable? Wasn't the same demanded of Saddam?

Haniyeh is not a madman nor is he an “Islamofascist.” In fact, it may be that Haniyeh’s dreams are not that different from the average Israeli citizen.

Consider the polls that were conducted just days after the election of Mahmoud Abbas. One survey showed that nearly 80% of Israelis supported immediate peace talks with the new Palestinian president. The Israeli leadership, of course, stubbornly refused even though Yasir Arafat had died a month earlier. The Israeli political establishment is resolutely against peace talks or negotiations. Unlike the vast majority of Israeli citizens--Israel's ruling elite reject the principle of "land for peace!”

Perhaps, Arafat wasn’t the “obstacle to peace” after all. Perhaps it was just a PR swindle to avoid real dialogue?

Israeli leaders have no intention of negotiating with the Palestinians, regardless of what the Israeli public wants or who’s sitting in Ramallah. The Zionist “grand plan” will not be compromised by conferences or bartering. The military occupation and settlement activity will continue until US support dries up and Israel is forced to the bargaining table. Until then the onslaught will continue.

Another Siege of Gaza?

Ha’aretz reports that Israel is planning to launch a military operation in Gaza aimed at crushing Hamas.( “Barak planning military operation in Gaza within weeks” 6-17-07) The invasion will involve 20,000 troops, armored vehicles, tanks, and air support.

But what is the justification? Is it because the US-Israeli plan to overthrow Hamas with Palestinian militias failed? Or is it because the duly-elected government has reclaimed the power it was given at the ballot box?

According to an Israeli official, the invasion will be in response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel or another suicide bombing.

In other words, Israel is devising a pretext for “regime change” EVEN BEFORE THEY ARE ATTACKED. Until then, the border crossings will remain closed, the blockade will be tightened, and the economic asphyxiation will continue.

In the face of US-Israeli plotting, consider the comments of Prime Minister Haniyeh, who articulates as well as anyone, the aspirations of the Palestinians people:

“We do not want to live on international welfare and American handouts. We want what Americans enjoy -- democratic rights, economic sovereignty and justice. We thought our pride in conducting the fairest elections in the Arab world might resonate with the United States and its citizens. Instead, our new government was met from the very beginning by acts of explicit, declared sabotage by the White House. Now this aggression continues against 3.9 million civilians living in the world's largest prison camps.

We present this clear message: If Israel is prepared to negotiate seriously and fairly, and resolve the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967, a fair and permanent peace is possible. Based on a hudna (comprehensive cessation of hostilities for an agreed time), the Holy Land still has an opportunity to be a peaceful and stable economic powerhouse for all the Semitic people of the region. If Americans only knew the truth, possibility might become reality”.

Hamas history of violence is problematic, but it should not be an insurmountable obstacle to peace. The IRA had a similar history and, yet, those issues were ultimately resolved through the Good Friday peace accords. Now, the warring factions have joined together in a power-sharing agreement and there’s reason to believe that the armed struggle phase of the conflict is over. A similar remedy is possible between Israel and Palestine.

Hamas entry into the political system should be seen for what it is--- a step in the right direction. It is an indication that they are tired of the armed struggle and want to pursue a political solution. Israel and the US should be receptive to this. They should reward Hamas’ efforts to stop the suicide bombing and agree to backchannel negotiations. That will determine whether common ground can be reached on any of the main issues. If the violence resumes, Israel can always return to its present strategy but, it’s certainly worth a try.

At the very least, Bush and Olmert should respect the will of the Palestinian people and allow Hamas to perform its duties without further hectoring, sanctions, violence or sabotage. The US and Israel have no right to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign government. If Hamas perpetrates violence against Israel, then Israel has every right to respond. But until then, they should show restraint and try to play a constructive role in strengthening the emergent Palestinian democracy.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Glenn Greenwald is a great treasure and you just have to thank him once again, this time for taking the time and trouble to nail the Podhoretzs -- father and son -- for who they are and what they are. At the end he suggests that their desire to kill millions of Iranians (on Israel's behalf, and on behalf of their own sickness) reflects the mainstream. But I doubt it. The mainstream pretty much understands how crazy and cruel and psychopathic such a project would be. The great problem is that the Podhoretzs speak for the decision makers, Bush and Cheney who, if we read the latest tea leaves correctly, seem intent on bombing Iran sometime next year.Interestingly, while Greenwald has no problem labeling Podhoretz psychopathic, he doesn't do the same for Bush and Cheney who have done nothing but reveal their pathology for the last 6 years.--Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.org***

Glenn GreenwaldThursday June 21, 2007http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.htmlFace of a psychopath

Neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz followed up his Commentary article titled "The case for bombing Iran" -- excerpts of which were re-published in The Wall St. Journal -- with an interview elaborating on why he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran and how he envisions the bombings. Though he generously acknowledges that such an action would likely "unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we've experienced so far look like a lovefest" -- consequences to which he is transparently (and revealingly) indifferent -- he goes on to suggest that Europeans and even the Muslim world might be grateful for our attack; the bombs will be greeted as Bombs of Liberation and Protection:

It's entirely possible that many countries, particularly in the Middle East -- the Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, who are very worried about Iranian influence and power --would at least secretly applaud us. And I think it's possible that other countries in Europe, for example, and elsewhere, would be relieved to see the Iranians entirely deprived of the capability to build nuclear weapons, or at least have that ability retarded for five or 10 years or more.

As Think Progress notes, not only would a bombing campaign fail to stop the Iranian nuclear program, it would be far more likely to accelerate it, just as the Israeli attack on the Iraqi program did. And a military bombing campaign, guaranteed to kill untold numbers of Iranian civilians, would obviously unite Iranians in anti-American hatred and generate unified support for the most militant political elements in that country.

But beyond those rather obvious points, just contemplate the level of bombing and slaughter that would be required merely to have a chance of fulfilling Podhoretz's goal of "entirely depriv[ing Iran] of the capability to build nuclear weapons, or at least have that ability retarded for five or 10 years or more." How would that be remotely possible without bombing them until Podhoretz's real goal -- regime change -- were achieved, a goal which, if achievable at all, would require bombing so widespread and brutal that it ought to be unthinkable. Yet Podhoretz sits there, in the most smug and casual manner, and blithely "hopes and prays" that we do it.

Any doubts about what Norman Podhoretz is -- and what the movement is which reveres him -- ought to be forever dispelled by his answer, given in the same interview, to the question of what the British should have done in response to the detention of 15 of their sailors by Iran:

They should have threatened to bomb the Iranians into smithereens if the sailors weren't returned immediately. They should have threatened it. Whether they would have had to carry out the threat, I doubt, maybe they would have.

Just think about that. England should have threatened and then "bombed the Iranians into smithereens" if their sailors were not returned immediately. Contemplate the depravity required even to suggest such a thing -- that a nation of more than 70 million human beings be reduced to rubble, perhaps vaporzied, over an incident of that magnitude, which was peacefully resolved after two weeks. It is really warped beyond belief. And it's the tone that is almost as notable as the content -- the breezy, smug wave of the hand that signifies the brutal deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, possibly many more.

And there is nothing unusual about Norm Podhoretz in the neoconservative world that he leads. Unsurprisingly, it is Norm's son, John, who -- beyond his garden-variety excitement over bombing Iran -- made one of the most reprehensible and deranged (though illustrative) statements of the entire Bush presidency:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

At the time, Greg Djerejian said in response:

It's quite sad that the son of an accomplished, prestigious American intellectual would muse so innocuously about the merits of mass butchery--basically the wholesale slaughter of a broad demographic of an ethnic group writ large--a policy prescription that is quasi-genocidal in nature.

It may be "sad," but at this point it is certainly unsurprising. And the "accomplished, prestigious American intellectual" who is John Podhoretz's father shares the family enthusiasm for "mass butchery." And while all of our media stars solemnly lament how the "fringe" liberal bloggers are ruining our political culture with all of their naughty words and extremism, the genocide-craving Podhoretz Family sits at the epicenter of a political movement that is still as predominant and powerful as it is deranged, and they are treated with the utmost seriousness and respect.

In this week's Newsweek, Michael Hirsh has a worthwhile article reporting on his observations during his visit to Iran. While listing the internally repressive measures taken by the Iranian governemnt, Hirsh describes Tehran as "bustling," as "traffic crowds the streets and boulevards," filled with the "chic" Iranian women and the "meterosexual" Iranian males who seek greater economic security and prosperity. That is what Norm Podhoretz and his friends hungrily want to annihilate.

Matt Yglesias, in a recent post about the administration's "debate" over whether to bomb Iran, wisely included a random photograph of an Iranian street with civilians walking on it. These are the people Norm Podhoretz and his comrades want to slaughter:

[Photo by Flickr user Koldo used under a Creative Commons license]

Our ability to render invisible the people we kill when cheering on our wars is one of the primary mechanisms which make it so easy to embrace that option. Yesterday, a quite revealing exchange occurred during the White House Press gaggle; it is unnecessary to identify the reporter asking these questions because there is really only one White House correspondent who would (the one who is considered to be "crazy" by her "journalistic" colleagues as a result of disrespectful and annoyingly off-script outbursts like this):

Q A study shows that Iraq is the second-most unstable country in the world. Do we have anything to do with that?

MR. SNOW: Do we have anything to do with that? Yes, I saw the study --

Q -- the killing?

MR. SNOW: We don't -- I'm not sure I got the --

Q I'm talking about Petraeus, also, intensifying -- is he trying to build a kill record before September?

MR. SNOW: No. No. In point of fact, Helen, if you take a look at the record of the last two months, the people who have been trying to put together the kill record are al Qaeda. Go to the mosques --

Q Is everybody who resists our occupation a terrorist?

MR. SNOW: Do you think somebody who goes in and blows up 50 people in a mosque is resisting occupation?

Q What have we done for five years?

MR. SNOW: What we have been trying to do is to work with folks to deal with a highly volatile situation in Iraq in the wake of a murderous regime --

Q We've killed thousands of people, tens of thousands --

MR. SNOW: Many have died, and hundreds of thousands died under the previous regime. This is a place that has too long been wracked by violence. And the fact that in fighting --

Q We're not supposed to be comparing, are we?

MR. SNOW: Unfortunately, if we fought evil guys who simply would say, you caught us, we're evil, we give up, we'll be good -- that would be great, that would be wonderful.

Q Everybody isn't evil who fights for his land.

MR. SNOW: A lot of the people we're talking about, Helen, aren't fighting for their land, because it's not their land. They don't even come from Iraq.

Q Are we fighting Iraqis, inherently, in their own country?

MR. SNOW: Are we fighting Iraqis inherently? I think if you take a look at what General Petraeus is saying, is that increasingly Iraqis are joining with us to defend their country from the onslaught of outside fighters, whether they be from al Qaeda or Iran.

Q Good, but we have to admit we're killing a lot of Iraqis who are against our presence.

MR. SNOW: I'm not sure. I mean, that requires the kind of canvas of those who have died that I'm not capable of doing.

Nothing could be more boring to Tony Snow than the question of how many Iraqi civilians we have killed as a result of our invasion and occupation. His yawn is virtually audible. What could be less relevant than that? It is better if we do not know. We can just keep repeating over and over that we are "killing Al Qaeda" -- a "fact" which Michael Gordon and The New York Times will be happy repeatedly to re-inforce -- and we can ignore the rest.

What Norman Podhoretz is advocating -- blowing Iran into "smithereens" -- is criminal and morally twisted for reasons that should require no elaboration. But the far more significant fact is that such advocacy does not relegate him to the fringes. Quite the contrary, the movement of which he is an integral part, on whose behalf he speaks, is well within the political mainstream as depicted by our political press. And it is doubtful that there is anything he (and his comrades) could do or say which would change that.

-- Glenn Greenwald***Ellen wrote:Yes, it's a good piece about the genocidal duo. He doesn't go far enough for me. The neocons are the new nazis. It's not good form to say this, but this is what the US is: the Fourth Reich. I agree with Ronald that Greenwald should have said something about the arch-fiends Cheney and Bush.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

For those who may be confused about how the WTC Towers collapsed and would like to see credible evidence offered concisely, here is Morgan Reynolds’s two page account, which he presents by way of Kevin Ryan, an environmental engineer who was

the site manager of Environmental Health Laboratories, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, which had certified the steel components used in construction of the WTC towers for their ability to withstand fires. In November of 2004, Ryan wrote a letter to Dr. Frank Gayle, a metallurgist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ryan’s letter challenged the preliminary NIST metallurgical findings on the WTC collapses, saying: “This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers.”

Explaining his reasons for this statement, Ryan said:

[S]teel components were certified to ASTM E119…[T]he steel applied met those specifications,. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2,000⁰ F for several hours… [E]ven un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3,000⁰ F… [T]he buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.

Therefore, the suggestion by one expert, “that 2,000⁰ F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.” Ryan even pointed out that Gayle himself suggested, “that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500⁰ F (250⁰ C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.”

These findings were ignored, Ryan pointed out to Gayle, as the official summary effectively claimed.

that these low temperatures cause exposed bits of the building’s steel core to “soften and buckle.” Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that “most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250⁰ C degrees.” To soften steel for the purpose of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1,1000 C,

four times higher. Ryan thereby rejected NIST’s implication that such low temperatures were able not only to “soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.”

The absurdity of the official story about the WTC collapses being caused by fires weakening WTC steel is further exposed by another fact: “Corus Constructions Corporations performed extensive tests in multiple countries in which they subjected steel-framed carparks, which were uninsulated, to prolonged hydrocarbon fueled fires,” writes Jim Hoffman, “and the highest temperatures they recorded in any of the steel beams or columns was a mere 360 C. At that temperature, structural steel loses only about 1 percent of its strength.” Besides the fact that steel conducts heat extremely well, so that the heat from the fire in any one part of one of the towers would have been quickly diffused throughout the rest of the building, the towers had redundant strength on the order of 600 percent. Another problem with the official story is that if the fires were hot enough to cause massive steel columns to buckle, some of the aluminum façade should have melted, given the fact that aluminum melts at less than half the temperature required to melt steel.

For these and many other reasons, the official theory about the collapse of the WTC buildings is physically impossible.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Sam has a good point. You might want to run and catch these videos while they're still hot. It's actually 3 nine minute plus videos. The first two are the explosive ones. (The third, mostly on the Pentagon I didn't find very helpful although there are some good shots of the lack of plane wreckage at Shanksville.)

The second video shows that it was a missile that struck the South Tower, the second hit, the one where we were shown a "plane" which is very nicely exposed here as a CGI image. Critics will say that it's not clear that it's a missile. It could be something quite harmless. That's true. It's evidence, not proof. But I would ask them: would they rather be on the side of the prosecutor or the defense trying Bush and Cheney for treason with this evidence? The video also shows how the puppetmasters realizing their mistake, erased evidence of the missile with later copies of the same video, but to do that, they also had to erase the Jersey coastline.

Other notable moments from the first two videos were when the producers showed us how the CGI images of a plane were managed. They got video of the Twin Towers from a mile or two from the North taken from a helicopter, and into that video they later inserted the CGI image of a plane going into the South Tower. Also nicely shown in the two videos are the use of a blank screen at a moment when the bad guys noticed that a critical image had to be hidden.

Viewers will note that these videos are fodder for the tiny but hopefully growing No Planes subsection of 911 Truth. Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.org***

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/108.html

Sam wrote:The light is shining on this. Shine more light if you wish, by "spreading the light".Maybe you should view this soon, as it may disappear.Sam

Brasscheck TV: Explosive new 9/11 evidence

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/108.html

Brasscheck TV Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 3:55 AM To: Sam

Sam,

Three days ago, the 40th anniversaryof the cold-blooded ambush and massacreof crew members of the USS Liberty bythe Israeli military went unnoticed andunreported.

It's a testiment to the power of mediamanipulation...making "inconvienient"facts disappear.

Sometimes, instead of making factsdisappear media manipulation requirescreating images of things that neverhappened.

Shocking and convincing new evidence ofvideo image manipulation of what wassupposed to be "live" footage on 9/11:

Xymphora:The neocons, seeing power slip away with the new American distaste for war, are desperate to restart the Cold War by provoking Russia. As already noted, extreme American militarism is regarded by the Zionists as a necessary precondition of the Zionist Empire. Thus, the patently obvious bullshit that the European missile shield is intended to stop missiles from ‘rogue states’ such as Iran. The Russians know that the Americans know that a nuclear attack isn’t coming from Iran. The shield is really supposed to stop Russia’s ability to respond to an American nuclear attack, and thus is clearly intended to start a new arms race. Putin has called the American/Zionist bluff by offering to participate in the shield. Since that won’t do the Zionists any good, don’t expect to see any American agreement to the Putin suggestion.

Ronald wrote:The only point Xymphora's missing or only implying is the Bleier viewTM that Bush-Cheney's anti Russia policy incorporates a radical neocon vision of endless war, and has the ultimate goal of a suicidal nuclear exchange with Russia and/or China (which would be advanced by the enlargement of the Iraq war). Bush and Cheney are very happy on one level with Putin's discomfort with a missile shield on Russia's borders since their intention is to increase US-Russia tensions (and tensions everywhere else) as high as possible.

Perhaps Bush and Cheney are not so happy that Putin is screaming bloody murder about it and trying to provoke some international and perhaps domestic US pushback. In the latter case, it's hopeless, as big media has apparently universally adopted the White House spin (perhaps explaining some of Xymphora's intemperate language.)

Xymphora also overemphasizes the Zionist angle. On the one hand he's got it right that Zionism requires US militarism: that's why the Israelis were so disappointed that we gave up our destruction of Vietnam after only ten years or so. On the other hand, his last sentence mistakenly credits the Zionists for the overarching Bush-Cheney agenda of permanent war. That's homegrown American neocon nihilism -- the destruction of everything.

Friday, June 08, 2007

It will be seen that Newsday doesn't say that the JFK plot is totally bogus. They simply say that it seems like it's hyped. I said totally bogus to myself as soon as I heard about it and more and more as I saw some of the details, especially as it began to appear that we have yet another case of bunch of hapless people entrapped by an "informant." All this consistent with the bogus war on terror that candidate John Edwards has dared to publicize and for which he's probably losing millions of votes day by day. The security services, FBI,CIA, NSA (others?) need to justify their ever growing budgets with these entrapment events and Bush-Cheney are continually engaged in preparing/softening the public for their ongoing and next wars. (Thanks to Xymphora for the pointer. See below for remarks that are closer to mine than I recalled -- or vice versa.)--Ronaldhttp://desip.igc.org***

NewsdayCredibility of JFK terror case questioned

BY CAROL EISENBERGcarol.eisenberg@newsday.com

June 6, 2007

When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," which might have caused "unthinkable" devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.

The plot, he knew, was never operational. The public had never been at risk. And the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.

And now, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf's initial characterizations seem more questionable -- some go so far as to say hyped.

"I think her comments were over the top," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "It was a totally overstated characterization that doesn't comport with the facts."

Greenberger said he has no argument with police pursuing and stopping the alleged plotters.

"I think they were correct to take this seriously," he said. "... But there's a pattern here of Justice Department attorneys overstating what they have. I think they feel under tremendous pressure to vindicate the elaborate counterterrorism structure they've created since 9/11, including the Patriot Act."

Mauskopf declined to comment Tuesday, but Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) dismissed criticism of law enforcement as "the price of success when you haven't been attacked in six years. We've gone from criticizing them for not doing enough immediately after 9/11 to now criticizing them too much."

But some say it is time for a more nuanced public discussion. Terrorism expert Peter Bergen said he doesn't consider the airport plot or most of the recent homegrown cases serious threats but believes law enforcement officials are right to pursue them.

"Obviously they're talking about stuff," he said. "But did they have the capabilities or training to do it? The answer is obviously not. It seems to me the reason the London plot worked is these guys had gone to an al-Qaida training camp. ... To become an effective terrorist, generally you have to go to a training camp. Timothy McVeigh was an effective terrorist because he could draw on his years of military background."

In this case, the alleged plotters had no money and never succeeded in hooking up with the head of an Islamist group in Trinidad called Jamaat al Muslimeen, according to the criminal complaint. While alleged mastermind Defreitas told the FBI informant that he learned to make bombs in Guyana, there is no other indication of technical expertise. Friends say he supported himself by selling incense on street corners and collecting welfare.

What, then, is the line between informing and scaring the public -- and is there a political cost in crossing it?

Steven Simon, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the government's hyperbolic descriptions -- whether of this case or of the alleged plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago -- could erode public confidence in law enforcement and lead to confusion about the terror threat.

"First, it creates the public impression that the adversary is just a bunch of losers who do not have to be feared," he said. "Second, the fact that these hapless people are angry enough to seek to attack the U.S. raises the issue of other more competent, well-organized groups that might be escaping police detection."

Which is not to say that the threat is not real.

The law enforcement official chagrined by Mauskopf's characterization said that just because the airport plotters had no expertise doesn't mean they couldn't have inflicted pain -- whether catastrophic or not.

"What everyone in law enforcement is struggling with since 9/11 is finding the balance between the traditional crimefighting and counterterrorism methods," said the official, who asked not to be named. "In ... crime-fighting, something has happened, you investigate, and you arrest. ... In terrorism, it's all about prevention.

"This guy wanted to cripple JFK International Airport. ... It's not really useful in the overall scheme of things to wonder whether he would have achieved anything. Because unless you're the one standing guard at the tank farm, and you're going to stop the thing, it's pure speculation. ... Isn't the whole point that we want to stop these folks before they try to hit us?" Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.***

xymphora writes:

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

Thursday, June 7, 2007:

More on the hyped JFK ‘terrorist’ attack. There must be a huge law-enforcement campaign to discover patsies who can be molded, with the help of informants, into the center of phony terrorist groups, who can then be arrested to justify the massively increased spending in law enforcement, with the accompanying loss of civil liberties.

6.8.07Elias wrote:Yes, I agree with you. Have you read the Criminal Complaint, in which the background of the FBI informer is listed? The term "informer" is anyhow a misnomer. This convicted drug smuggler (the FBI guy) was proposed a deal, to cooperate with the FBI and obtain a reduced sentence. He had an incentive to entrap the hapless chap. We really do not know to which extent this criminal actually led the "terrorist conspiracy". We know, from that Complaint that the FBI guy bought for the alleged terrorist a video camera so he could film Kennedy airport. It is thus reported to the court that the FBI actually financed the terror preparation. That won't surprise you. More important to note is the fact that the media have consciously kept silent about the background of this FBI "informer" and about the role the FBI played in entrapping.

Elias***A reader passed this along from infowars.comJFK Airport Plot Has All The Hallmarks Of Staged TerrorNear-retarded "ringleader", paid government provocateur mirrors legion of previous cases

An alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks, terminal buildings and fuel lines running beneath Kennedy International Airport has all the hallmarks of being another staged terror alert, having never advanced beyond a rudimentary planning stage while being prodded and provocateured by a paid government informant.

In every single major terror sting we have researched in the west since 9/11, not one single plot has been absent the ingredient of a government provocateur, save the cases that were outright manufactured by imaginative government propagandists in alliance with the corporate media.

In this case, the provocateur was "An informant with a criminal history including drug trafficking and racketeering agreed to work with investigators on the case, in exchange for payments and a reduced sentence," according to the New York Times .

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

A brilliant and very important article by Jonathan Cook outlining the current hardball Israeli game plan for removing the "demographic threat" and how ruthlessly the Israelis react to the the growing Palestinian consensus that the state of Israel should be a state for all its citizens, which would seem to point to a one state solution. Here's a parlor trick: ask a Zionist why Israel has no constitution and watch how they dance around the subject, preferring not to address the clear issue of equality for all.

For an example of the level of Israeli intimidation of Palestinian legislators in Israel Jonathan Cook writes:

In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.

Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, arrives at the Jerusalem Shalom court in Jerusalem, 7 February 2007. (Anat Zakai/MaanImages) The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.

But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.

So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?

I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.

It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.

Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded

These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.

The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.

In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.

There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.

But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew ... In another few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."

The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this "threat" have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.

All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority in the world".

But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials offended by the presence of legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism and privileges for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.

The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist parties, as was the case for many decades, but as representatives of independent Palestinian parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)

Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens"

The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform: the demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.

The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade, as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state.

Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly convincing case to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than challenging the hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a time, they should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they will never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.

Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's creation living under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and memories were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over its educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the Shin Bet, through a network of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.

Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said they would support the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly, however, what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a third of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to more than half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be prominently featured in such a constitution.

These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's political work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most of whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of participating in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is impossible for a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally does not mention equality anywhere in its text.

It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late April should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced that he would face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations -- renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been in operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty. Bishara so far has chosen not to return.

Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services have been trying to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a gagging order. The first accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in the north during the war against Lebanon last summer.

The Shin Bet claims this after months of listening in on his phone conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that allows the security services to bug legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they are being subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.

Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.

The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason against Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial."

Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the charge of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct "psychological warfare through the media".

The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target audience. The Shin Bet claims that Bishara laundered money from terrorist organisations. The implication, though the specifics are unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.

It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on testimony from a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.

This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only other Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the armed wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.

As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against him. Salah spent more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting the Shin Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret evidence was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages, as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial impropriety in return for his release.

To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation had funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the occupied territories and had submitted its accounts to the security services for approval. In a recent interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his party had discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows and students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".

Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly before his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning the security establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's interference in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.

Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds for welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very moment Israel was trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying Palestinians inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian state.

Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel to protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel was using the exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem to assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's advisers later noted.

Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised

Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised. The trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when he might have been able to make a difference.

That now is the fate of Bishara.

Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at least the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared for a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed: "Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General." Who expressed that view? None other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor party and hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.

In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges later fizzled out); he has been called in for police interrogations on a regular basis; he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed specifically to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.

True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections Committee during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of this can also be found in the ideological progress from the margins of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a discernible effect on the content of political discourse and on the public 'agenda' of the Arab sector."

But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court's justices.

The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing identification with the State and the rise of subversive elements".

Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four different visionary documents sharing the perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a Jewish state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites might determine a direction that will win over the masses."

The secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform was spreading

In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found in the four recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent groups: the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics known as Mada.

What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first, that existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two states and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue living inside Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its Declaration of Independence.

Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not the view of the Shin Bet.

Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper wrote to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The secret police had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive threats", it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of 'defensive democracy'."

Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became public, the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the state's basic principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish character". He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage, subversion".

In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use Israel's supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.

The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the other Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community inside Israel should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence" -- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent of its Palestinians.

The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it is operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the state's more accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed in it is acceptable to the attorney general."

So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been claiming, a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.

Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net.